Interrogating Technology-led Experiments in Sustainability Governance

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University of Groningen

Interrogating Technology-led Experiments in Sustainability Governance

Bernards, Nick ; Campbell-Verduyn, Malcolm; Rodima-Taylor, Daivi; Duberry, Jerome;

Dupont, Quinn; Dimmelmeier, Andreas; Huetten, Moritz; Mahrenbach, Laura; Porter, Tony;

Reinsberg, Berhard

Published in: Global Policy DOI:

10.1111/1758-5899.12826

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Bernards, N., Campbell-Verduyn, M., Rodima-Taylor, D., Duberry, J., Dupont, Q., Dimmelmeier, A.,

Huetten, M., Mahrenbach, L., Porter, T., & Reinsberg, B. (2020). Interrogating Technology-led Experiments in Sustainability Governance. Global Policy, 11(4), 523-531. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12826

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Interrogating Technology-led Experiments in

Sustainability Governance

Nick Bernards

University of Warwick

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn

University of Groningen

Daivi Rodima-Taylor

Boston University

Jerome Duberry

University of Geneva

Quinn DuPont

University College Dublin

Andreas Dimmelmeier

University of Warwick

Moritz Huetten

Darmstadt Business School

Laura C. Mahrenbach

Technical University of Munich

Tony Porter

McMaster University

Bernhard Reinsberg

University of Glasgow

Abstract

Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology-intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio-political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustain-ability governance challenges, many technology-centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer-standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under-recognized ways. This article identiﬁes three overlap-ping contexts within which technology-led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The conﬂuence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under-recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi-stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforc-ing rather than transformreinforc-ing existreinforc-ing forms of power relations. Without recognizreinforc-ing and attemptreinforc-ing to address these limits, technology-led multi-stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long-standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.

P

olicy

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Digital technologies in sustainability governance:

possibilities, politics, power

Efforts to harness emerging technologies to address a host of new and longer-standing sustainability challenges have

recently proliferated. Artiﬁcial intelligence (AI), blockchain,

big data and other new technologies are central to a grow-ing number of on-gogrow-ing experiments, ranggrow-ing from the tracking of greenhouse emissions to monitoring wildlife poaching and global supply chains, to transnational efforts

to combat human trafﬁcking, and manage the COVID-19

pandemic. These unfolding experiments seek to mobilize digital technologies to meet a growing range of governance challenges that are typically grouped together under the

banner of sustainability and sustainable development.1

These developments have not, however, been much inter-rogated in international relations and global governance scholarship (though see Boersma and Nolan, 2019; Duberry, 2019; Gale, Ascui, and Lovell, 2017). Existing policy and practi-tioner debates, meanwhile, tend to emphasize the

affor-dances and pathologies of speciﬁc digital technologies

(Beaumier et al., 2020). A number of important questions have thus remained unaddressed: How do unfolding initiatives cen-tred on AI, blockchains, big data and other emerging tech-nologies seek to overcome, or extend and reinforce, the limits of existing global governance? What debates and conﬂicts of interest are elided by appeals to technological applications as solutions to governance challenges? How does the develop-ment and deploydevelop-ment of new technologies intersect with existing disparities of power, resources, and access?

This article begins to address these questions, synthesiz-ing discussions an interdisciplinary workshop on these themes held at the University of Warwick in December 2019. We situate on-going technology-led experiments in sustainability governance within three longer-standing glo-bal trends: (1) a growing reliance on private, voluntary codes of conduct, standards, and third-party auditing; (2) global experimentalist governance; and (3) efforts to adapt gover-nance mechanisms to deal with the growing prevalence of informal and illicit economies. In light of this, we argue that uses of technology in multi-stakeholder initiatives have tended to reduce rather the scope for participation in sus-tainability governance, deepen challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforce rather than transform exist-ing power relations.

In what follows, we outline the above three global gover-nance trends in turn, tracing their intersections with emerg-ing technology-centred initiatives in global sustainability governance. We then conclude by outlining a number of questions for scholars, practitioners and policy makers to consider in interrogating the uses of technology in sustain-ability governance.

Technology and private governance

Technology-centred initiatives to improve global sustainabil-ity governance are in many ways extensions of the patch-work of private codes of conducts and corporate social

responsibility (CSR) policies developed in recent decades.

The inability of these corporate-led modes of ‘responsible

governance’ to yield signiﬁcant improvements for workers and the planet is well-documented (Fransen and Burgoon, 2012; Koenig-Archibugi, 2017; LeBaron, Lister and Dau-vergne, 2017). Such initiatives have frequently resulted in

mere ‘corporate philanthropy’ that favours powerful

stake-holders over grassroots communities (Orock, 2013). These

modes of governance have often reinforced existing

inequalities. For example, corporate codes of conduct for worker safety in garment supply chains have been found to pass costs of compliance on to supplier factories. Yet, they do little to alleviate the time and cost pressures placed on suppliers by major branded buyers, who often drive unsafe

working conditions in the ﬁrst place (Scheper, 2017; Taylor,

2011).

Recent responses to these failures increasingly rely new technologies. Big data and blockchain technologies, for example, are increasingly instrumental to a growing range

of ‘multi-stakeholder’ arrangements between private

for-proﬁt ﬁrms and public bodies seeking, for instance, to

pro-tect working conditions or to trace and disclose greenhouse

gas emissions and ‘conﬂict minerals’ across global supply

chains. These experiments are being developed and applied in ways that reinforce existing patterns of governance and relations of power.

Novel technologies are being integrated into the

long-standing practices of private professional service ﬁrms in

monitoring sustainability across global supply chains.

Previ-ous research shows how the ‘big four’ professional services

firms (KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, and EY) firms play a significant and growing role in shaping private supply chain gover-nance (Fransen and LeBaron, 2018). The Big Four, along with

smaller audit ﬁrms and consultancies (e.g. RCS Global)

increasingly promote blockchains as means of improving the effectiveness of supply chain governance. Blockchain delivers a record of the origin and journey of the raw mate-rials, which is accessible to all relevant parties yet not

manipulable by any single ‘node’ in the shared digital

net-work. In so doing, blockchains can establish a community of participants and an authoritative record of provenance, and

by moving conﬁdential data freely between trading

part-ners, could enhance transparency and accountability. Yet, these developments leave supply chain governance

domi-nated by lead ﬁrms, often working with the ‘big four’ and

more specialized supply chain management consultants. The entities developing and supporting such technology-led pro-jects are frequently the same ones involved in existing glo-bal supply chain governance. The prominent roles of audit ﬁrms and private sector consultants in developing techno-logical solutions to global sustainability governance

chal-lenges raise important issues. The proﬁt models of such

ﬁrms rest primarily on service fees. There is a danger that

private actors’ proﬁt incentives could further fragment

stan-dards and enforcement across the proliferating range of ‘sustainability services’. Competition for clients threatens to

produce a ‘race to the bottom’ of the kind seen among

credit ratings agencies in the build-up to the globalﬁnancial

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crisis (Kruck, 2011). Equally, such initiatives provide no new standards or enforcement mechanisms and remain reliant on existing forms of factory-, farm-, or mine-level monitor-ing. In the words of a manager at one blockchain-based audit start-up:

A blockchain will record an immutable record of

custody of a material, the locations it’s traveled

through, its composition over time, and all that. . .

But if you’re trying to make sure the wrong

mate-rial never enters the system in the ﬁrst place, you

need processes to make this work.

(Hyperledger n.d., p. 3). In brief, blockchain applications for supply chain gover-nance leave market-based forms of govergover-nance rooted in ‘disclosure’ and soft standards largely intact, both in terms of the actors involved and the standards being enforced.

We can see similar issues at stake if we move from supply

chain governance to new methods of ‘greening’ ﬁnancial

markets, another key area where experiments with new technologies are underway. Environmental, social and gover-nance (ESG) investment and ESG ratings have grown rapidly as big data and other technologies have enabled investors to quantify hard-to-measure socio-political variables. Yet,

standards for what counts as ‘sustainable’ still vary. Earlier

accounting frameworks related to CSR – including the

Glo-bal Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project –

have been accused of providing an ‘alphabet soup’ of

poorly-correlated indicators (IMF, 2019). More recent indus-try-led efforts like the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) are somewhat better. The TCFD has departed from earlier CSR deﬁnitions of sustainability by

only including‘ﬁnancial material’ ESG issues. Led by Bank of

America chief executive and working closely with the Big

Four accounting ﬁrms, the World Economic Forum (WEF)

has initiated a framework to standardize ESG metrics and link them to the UN’s SDGs (Naumann and Temple West, 2020).

Debates over applications of new technologies in sustain-ability governance need to be situated within these

exer-cises in classiﬁcation and standardization regarding what

qualiﬁes as ‘sustainable’. The EU taxonomy, for instance, has

been linked to a green-supporting or brown-penalizing fac-tor for capital requirements (Fleming and Brunsden, 2019).

More encompassing policies like ‘green quantitative easing’

suggested by central banks can only become feasible once

consensual deﬁnitions of green or brown investing are

established. Put differently, to realize the potential of

tech-nologies, we must ﬁrst bring the context of private

gover-nance to the forefront of discussions about which

technologies can and should be used, as well as for which purposes.

The manners in which technology-led experiments in glo-bal sustainability governance foreground private over public was also illustrated in many of the immediate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization, for

instance, began coordinating a blockchain-based data

storage and communication platform to address the surge

in cyber attacks2 and mis-information during what it

described as the related ‘infodemic’.3 The platform, MiPasa,

is built on Hyperledger Fabric a permissioned (e.g. private) blockchain originally built by IBM and whose governing board consists of representatives of large technology (e.g.

Hitachi, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft), ﬁnance (American Express,

BBVA, JP Morgan Chase), professional services ﬁrms

(Accen-ture) and other MNCs (Daimler).4 Beyond blockchain

pro-jects, the wider trend towards reliance on private, individual deployment novel technologies in global sustainability gov-ernance was prominently encapsulated in the strategic part-nership framework agreement signed between the UN and

WEF in 2019 for ‘accelerating the implementation of the

Sustainable Development Goals’ (WEF, 2019). The ﬁrst key

focus area of this public-private partnership is harnessing

the ‘potential of ﬁnancial innovation, new technologies and

digitalisation to increase ﬁnancing for the SDGs’ (WEF,

2019).

In sum, technology-centred arrangements may tend to perpetuate and even expand the roles of private actors in sustainability governance, while potentially deepening the pathologies of existing forms of private governance. As we argue further in the next section, these tendencies are rein-forced by a parallel trend of experimentalism in global gov-ernance.

Experimentalist governance

Despite the considerable hype surrounding them, applica-tions of emerging technologies in sustainability governance remain very much provisional and experimental. It is thus useful to consider such initiatives in relation to on-going trends towards experimentalist forms of global governance.

Experimentalist governance involves the setting of goals, trialling of multiple policy measures, continuous monitoring of progress through quantitative indicators, and revision based on rigorous peer review (Sabel and Zeitlin, 2012).

Unlike centrally deﬁned and potentially more static forms of

management, such looser and ‘provisional’ governance

forms can promote the ﬂexible arrangements necessary to

respond to sustainability challenges in environments of uncertainty (Best, 2014). While academic literature on experi-mentalist governance originated in the study of devolved responses for addressing common concerns in the European

Union (Sabel and Zeitlin, 2012), wider forms of‘global

exper-imentalism’ have recently been outlined (De Burca et al.,

2014; Nance and Cottrell, 2014). To date, these studies have provided little consideration of the role of technologies in private-led patterns of global governance (Armeni, 2015; Campbell-Verduyn and Porter, 2014). This can overlap with

the forms of private governance discussed above – private

authorities can rely on experimentalist modes of governance (see Brassett et al., 2012). The distinction is essentially that,

in referring to‘private’ governance, the concern is with who

is doing the governing, while references to ‘experimentalist’

modes of governance are more about how governance is done.

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Critically, engagements both by public and private actors with blockchain, AI, and other emerging technologies are notably experimentalist in character. One example here is in the area of development aid. There are theoretical elabora-tions on potential applicaelabora-tions of blockchain to

develop-ment aid effectiveness, highlighting the potential of

transparent and immutable ledgers to enhance the credibil-ity of policy commitments or address veriﬁcation problems (e.g. Reinsberg, 2019). Actual policy interventions using these technologies, though, have generally taken precisely the form of trialling multiple measures, measuring out-comes, and constant revision. One notable example here is the German Gesellschaft f€ur internationale Zusammenar-beit’s (GiZ) ‘Blockchain Lab’, which sponsors and organizes pilot projects by public and private actors using blockchain to address challenges directly relating to the SDGs.

Bottom-up, less hierarchical forms of experimentalist gov-ernance enabled by new technologies, could in theory enrich sustainability governance by inviting participation from local actors. Linders (2013, p. 430), for instance, writes about potential open data platforms for developing

coun-tries to generate a ‘sort of TripAdvisor or Yelp for aid’ that

can encourage local accountability of technology-enhanced programs. In practice, experimentalism’s tendency to also offer highly technical solutions may deepen barriers to

par-ticipation. Experimentalist decision-making often draws

heavily on calculative rationalities derived from ﬁnancial

accounting in order to accurately compare the results of the diverse approaches employed to achieve common goals. In their focus on measuring and auditing performance, these rationalities often recast governance as merely a technical and administrative matter. This diminishes the role and input of local knowledge (Shore and Wright, 2015; Strathern, 2000).

Likewise, the growing technology-intensiveness of experi-mentalist governance narrows the range of non-state actors able to participate in public-private partnerships. It is primar-ily private companies and the largest INGOs that have the resources to create and manipulate the technologies at the heart of novel solutions to global sustainability challenges (Duberry, 2019). Consequently, smaller and more local actors, in particular from the Global South, may be left out, entrenching existing disparities in access and participation.

Moreover, these disparities may well be ampliﬁed as large

technologyﬁrms seek to maximize both data collection and

possession. Private companies’ access to a growing amount and diversity of data can thus shape agendas in ways that favour particularistic over collective concerns (Arora, 2016). For example, governments face domestic political pressures and economic challenges that open up space for interna-tionally-coordinated, experimentalist governance of the

digi-tal economy. The UN’s Global Pulse programme connects

academics, private and government actors and UN

person-nel to generate‘actionable’ insights about how Big Data can

facilitate sustainable development. But Global Pulse projects in practice are dominated by private businesses and govern-ments, with relatively limited possibilities for the involve-ment of CSOs. Likewise, geopolitical competition among

data powers, such as China, the US and the EU, can encour-age domestic experimentalist governance innovations, as these states seek to enhance and secure their own digital capabilities (Mahrenbach and Mayer, 2019). One prominent

example is China’s Great Firewall, which simultaneously

cleared the path for ground-breaking research and industrial development of AI and made it more difﬁcult for non-Chi-nese businesses to operate in China (Aaronson and Leblond, 2018). Diverse government incentives thus encourage exper-imentalist governance in the digital economy as a means of achieving preferred outcomes, while reinforcing patterns of political power and participation that may tend towards par-ticularistic rather than collective gains. The crucial roles of

large technology ﬁrms in sustainability experiments could

enable them to deﬁne the agendas and goals pursued. The

competing pressures faced by governments seeking to both expand their own gains from the digital economy and to use modern technologies further complicate the beneﬁts of experimentalism.

Governing informal and illicit economies

Finally, efforts to apply new technologies to sustainability challenges have very frequently been driven by efforts to grapple with the growing prevalence of informal economies. Here, our concern is with who and what are being gov-erned. Economic informality in this sense has been an important, cross-cutting concern in sustainable development policy in recent decades (see Bernards, 2018; Phillips, 2011;

Rodima-Taylor, 2014; Taylor, 2010).5 Informality refers to the

activities and actors that operate outside the regulations and laws of the modern economy (Loayza, 2016). Informal actors who usually represent marginal populations and groups are not able to fully beneﬁt from public services or formal sector protection and risk mitigation, while also not able to contribute to the creation of public goods through taxation and other mechanisms. At the same time, informal

sector enterprises may beneﬁt from greater ﬂexibility and

dynamism of their activities as well as serve as a source of employment for marginal populations during economic down-turns (Loayza, 2018). The dynamics of local informality are intricate, yet better attempts need to be made to under-stand the contexts in which many technology-led

sustain-ability governance initiatives are ultimately grounded.

Localized informal practices are wrapped up in global value chains, for instance, through casualized labour in agriculture or outsourcing in clothing production. These present partic-ular governance challenges around labour rights and envi-ronmental standards (Meagher, 2016).

Technological applications in sustainability governance

are often aimed at making informal or illicit economies

‘legi-ble’ both to regulators and to global capital. Muirhead and

Porter (2019) argue that the ‘traceability systems’ enabled

by new digital technologies for tracking the cross-border

travel of an increasingly diverse range of objects – including

conﬂict minerals, pharmaceuticals, carbon emissions, and

money laundering – form complex, heterogenous

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traced and the networks and infrastructures used for their management. By enabling clearer visibility and

authentica-tion of objects– including intangible ones – traceability

sys-tems can, in some instances, help reduce areas of informal or illicit activity. New technologies may render human traf-ﬁcking more visible and governable (e.g. by tracking illegal ﬁnancial transactions), broaden awareness of victims’ plight and facilitate networking between law enforcement and

non-state organizations combatting human trafﬁcking. An

example here is the Global Emancipation Network which brings together technology partners such as Microsoft, splunk, Deep Vision AI and others with law enforcement, anti-trafficking non-profits, and businesses in hospitality, finance and transportation to deploy advanced data

analyt-ics to make human trafﬁcking more visible as a means of

helping to stop it.6

Once again, there are important tradeoffs. Rendering local

actors ‘legible’ through technological means in the context

of global supply chains dominated by distant lead ﬁrms or

development projects by metropolitan donors can result in the imposition of external, pre-determined criteria on local spaces and practices. This interplay of informal activities with efforts to promote sustainability through formalization, transparency, and traceability, in turn, has signiﬁcant, if ambiguous, implications for livelihoods. Efforts to govern artisanal mining are a notable example (Vogel et al., 2018),

as are conservation measures (Witter and Satterﬁeld, 2019),

both of which are prone to excluding local populations. Technological applications can exacerbate these dynamics, particularly where they double down on the weaknesses of market-led forms of supply chain governance discussed above.

For example, there has been a recentﬂurry of blockchain

applications for preventing child labour in cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as demand for cobalt (a key component of batteries for electric cars and portable electronics) has surged in recent years (e.g. Lewis, 2019). Most of these programmes aim to prevent child labour by reliably certifying that cobalt has been mined from speciﬁc industrial installations rather than from arti-sanal mines, where most child labour takes place. Even if it were to eliminate child labour from global supply chains, displacing artisanal mining with industrial mining would likely have ambiguous livelihood consequences for mining communities at best. Recent research has highlighted, for instance, growing evidence of labour market segmentation, including a preference for expat workers in industrial min-ing, as well as limited wage gains for workers moving from artisanal to industrial mining in the Copperbelt, driving a rise in inequality in the region (Radley, 2020; Rubbers, 2019). There are serious questions here that need to be raised about the kinds of risks, and for whom, new technologies might be used to mitigate.

In sum, technological solutions to sustainability issues often boil down to attempts to render complex and

geo-graphically dispersed informal spheres of activity ‘legible’

and traceable. Such transparency efforts have important, yet often underexplored, implications. On the input-side, early

processes of technological development and application can be hampered by signiﬁcant disparities in access to material resources and representation that underpin digital and socio-economic divides. On the output side, transparency provided in evolving technological experiments is geared to

the investment decision matrices ofﬁnanciers, to the

regula-tory compliance mandates of governments, and to end con-sumers.

Suggestions for Research and Policy

Policy making and broader public discussion over the

integration of emerging technologies such as artiﬁcial

intelligence, Big Data, and blockchain into global sustain-ability governance need to be far more socially and politi-cally sensitive than is currently the case. Recognizing and overcoming these issues is particularly important now as these and other technologies are also being foregrounded in transnational efforts to secure global supply chains and

other responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.7 Digital

tech-nologies being applied in complex and evolving environ-ments both shape and are shaped by diverse human, material, and normative elements (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn, 2019). Heterogenous assemblages combine local inventive practices and cultural repertoires related to new technology solutions with old and new infrastructural

pipelines and institutional actors (Rodima-Taylor and

Grimes, 2019). The integration of new technologies into multi-stakeholder efforts to address sustainability chal-lenges must be understood within the longer-standing patterns of private authority, experimentalism, and strug-gles to cope with informal economies in global gover-nance.

By way of conclusion, we highlight a number of areas of concern that must become central to discussion, analysis and implementation of technology-led initiatives in global sustainability governance. These questions are crucial if we are to avoid extending well-known problems in attempting to address global sustainability governance challenges. Unfolding technological experiments do, of course, hold some promise, and constitute quite a wide terrain. They thus need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Yet, such assessments can collectively consider important but often

backgrounded social, political, and economic relations

through which new technologies are being developed and into which they are deployed:

Realistic evaluation of the potential of new technologies First and foremost, attention must be given to what new technologies cannot do. Technologies cannot solve

prob-lems that are social and political at the root – a point

under-lined in our discussion above. Many sustainability

governance problems concern politics and power. Three guiding questions can encourage a systematic approach to overcome contextual hindrances in employing technology to actualize sustainability goals: Whose problems are new

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technologies solving? What new problems might these tech-nologies create? And what other solutions might be fore-gone in stressing techno-solutionism?

For instance, probabilistic means of detecting likely

human trafﬁcking victims through AI applications might be

helpful in separating out forced and exploitative forms of mobility from benign ones. However, identifying victims alone is not enough to resolve the knot of issues shaping

and driving human trafﬁcking. AIs cannot say what should

happen after victims of trafﬁcking are located, or resolve the

underlying conditions which facilitate trafﬁcking in the ﬁrst

place. Without substantive attention to victims’ rights and

the overall institutional environment of reinforcing these rights, detection of trafﬁcked people might even render vic-tims susceptible in new ways (e.g. to securitized and crimi-nalized systems of border enforcement).

Attention to the new distribution of power triggered by the adoption of emerging technologies

We have argued that experimentalist modes of technology-driven sustainability governance can facilitate the introduc-tion of novel intermediaries and brokers, while also entrench-ing the roles of existentrench-ing actors. Many of the latter actors are private parties, such as audit and consulting companies;

many of the former are new tech ﬁrms. Moreover, ﬂuid

areas of activity enabled via new connective technologies bring together a variety of formal and informal actors.

As we have noted in the discussions of informality and experimentalism above, these developments are creating new political spaces, which can deepen old forms of exclu-sion and uneven access to participation. For example, the

private ﬁrms involved in ESG have a potential to promote

industry-driven visions of future research and development in environmental governance. These activities can also cre-ate new global publics through awareness-raising and

lob-bying, and deﬁne what ‘count’ as global sustainable

practices. There is a need to recognize the costs of access-ing these new quasi-public spaces, which can threaten to reinforce existing inequalities and divides. The resources and roles of large, well-funded international non-state organiza-tions in developing AI applicaorganiza-tions in environmental conser-vation, and the comparatively limited scope for participation by affected communities, are notable examples here. The new technologies increasingly used in sustainability gover-nance are accompanied by security implications, particularly regarding privacy, which are often not been adequately addressed in extant debates. Security technologies are

fun-damentally ‘sites of experimentation’, enmeshed in both

ethical and practical dilemmas (Bosma, 2019, p. 194). The inner workings of technologies have remained opaque ‘black boxes’ to many, if not most, stakeholders on grounds of security or economic competitiveness.

To ensure then that local voices – particularly those of

affected communities – remain at the forefront of

technol-ogy-enhanced sustainability governance activities, we sug-gest the following guiding questions. First, what kinds of actors are new technologies actually (dis)empowering?

Second, what kinds of exclusions or inequalities might be reinforced and/or created through technology-centred gov-ernance processes?

Tensions between‘audit culture’ and local participation

We have situated technology-led sustainability governance initiatives in the concomitant rise of private, voluntary codes and standards. We equally illustrated how experimentalist modes of decision-making that may extend standardized accounting practices and calculative rationales across diverse forms of sustainability governance might do so at the cost of local spaces and practices. The result of merging these ‘human accounting’ protocols and techniques of financial accounting with those of socio-economic management can be a prioritization of short-term profit maximization and financial markets’ agendas over longer-term sustainability needs. In recasting governance as a technical and adminis-trative affair, sustainability accounting can minimize

oppor-tunities for and contributions from local actors and

knowledge, respectively. Soft-law governance approaches –

from emerging ESG standards to labour codes – exacerbate

these issues, being both difﬁcult to challenge in case of

dis-putes and posing barriers to binding public regulation or independent civil society monitoring.

These insights should focus attention on the need to interrogate the kinds of transparency and accountability sought in advancing common templates across diverse and

informal communities. In seeking to render‘legible’ activities

in grassroots communities, private-driven sustainable gover-nance initiatives may paradoxically by-pass the roles and

needs of key local mediators. Bottom-up forms of ‘everyday

experimentation’ and ‘frugal innovation’ at the grassroots

level can be crucial to addressing sustainability issues, yet are often overlooked or marginalized in many current appli-cations (Altamirano and Van Beers, 2018; Leliveld and Knor-ringa, 2018). Ethical technology standards and frameworks must be developed in collaboration with local communities and stakeholders and by considering local norms and mor-als. Several guiding questions can help systematize this pro-cess of interrogation. First, what kinds of transparency and accountability are promoted by applications of new tech-nologies? And, second, who beneﬁts from the forms of

accountability that are pursued in speciﬁc sustainability

gov-ernance efforts?

Asking‘big’ questions on the need for participatory and

accountable frameworks

We have argued that private-led environmental and sustain-ability initiatives have a potential to reinforce power imbal-ances and exclusion when interacting with communities and institutional actors in the Global South. This is because the use and development of new technological solutions inter-acts with formal and informal, local and geopolitical agen-das and interests. The incomplete nature of frameworks and standards governing new digital technologies can do little © 2020 The Authors. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. GlobalPolicy(2020)

BERNARDS et al.

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to ameliorate these issues. Here again, we need local-speci-ﬁc, participatory development of accountability standards and frameworks in sustainability governance, in particular standards that embody local norms and morals.

From this perspective, stressing the novelty of technologi-cal solutions for complex and evolving sustainability chal-lenges can distract from the larger structural issues in which such governance is embedded. Helpful guiding questions here include: What kinds of end-goals should sustainability governance initiatives consider, and for whom? What kinds

of sustainability are emphasized in discourses – climate risk,

environmental risks, human/labour rights, or others? What political and moral assumptions are bundled into

technolog-ical applications and their use? Who has access to‘sustech’

applications and the capacity to use them? And are such solutions creating new digital divides?

In the current environments of high complexity and uncertainty surrounding sustainable governance initiatives, we argue that ethical, social and political considerations should be given foremost priority. This article has situated the novelty of new technologies in three wider trends to provide pathways for directing attention beyond mere tech-nical considerations. There is undoubtedly room for these and other technological initiatives to be grounded in further trends. We expect that doing so will raise a host of other questions pertaining to the evolving roles of technologies in sustainability governance. We look forward to engaging with

them – and encourage public and private actors central to

sustainability governance to do the same.

Notes

1. We are grateful to anonymous reviewer and editors at Global Policy for comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also gratefully acknowledgeﬁnancial support from the Institute for Advanced Stud-ies at the University of Warwick.‘Sustainability’ and ‘sustainable devel-opment’ are contested and somewhat ambiguous concepts. We are broadly interested here in interventions across the range of policy areas grouped under the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework. We recognize real debates about the internal consistency of the SDG framework (e.g. Rai et al. 2019; Hickel 2019), about the politics of measuring SDGs (Fukada-Parr & McNeill 2019), and fundamental contestation over the purpose and nature of the goals themselves (Gabay & Ilcan 2017). We nonetheless argue that the SDGs are useful in delineating ‘sustainability’ as recognized spheres of action in global policy-making.

2. https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-pandemic-has-unleashed-a-wave-of-cyber-attacks-heres-how-to-protect-yourself-135057 [Accessed 11 May 2020]. 3. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov-v3.pdf?sfvrsn=195f4010_6 [Accessed 11 May 2020]. 4. https://www.hyperledger.org/about/leadership#governing [Accessed 11 May 2020].

5. We are focused primarily in this section on efforts to govern informal economies, rather than informality in governance itself, though the latter is undoubtedly important in governing a number of policy areas relevant to sustainability and technology (Morin et al. 2019). 6.

https://www.globalemancipation.ngo/global-emancipation-network-mission-offerings/ [Accessed 11 May 2020].

7. By the‘usual suspects’ noted above such as the Big Four professional servicesﬁrms (Deloitte 2020), the WEF (Liao 2020), but also scholars

(Mashamba-Thompson and Crayton 2020) who _{“recommend a low}

cost blockchain and arti_{ﬁcial intelligence-coupled self-testing and} tracking systems for COVID-19 and other emerging infectious dis-eases” in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Author Information

Nick Bernards is Assistant Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the political econ-omy of irregular work, technology, and povertyﬁnance.

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn is Assistant Professor of International Polit-ical Economy in the Department of International Relations and

BERNARDS et al.

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International Organization at the University of Groningen. His research combines a general focus on ideas and materiality with a speci_ﬁc inter-est in the roles of non-state actors, technologies and technical artefacts in contemporary global governance.

Daivi Rodima-Taylor is a social anthropologist and researcher at the African Studies Center of Boston University, and visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine. She has taught anthropology and international relations and engaged in longitudinal ethnographic ﬁeld-work in African communities. Her current research focuses on the inter-section of grassroots economies and information technology.

Jerome Duberry is a research associate at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy, Graduate Institute Geneva. His research activities focus on the use of emerging technologies to support nature conservation and foster political participation. Jerome examines how civil society organizations can beneﬁt from the latest technological advances in arti-ﬁcial intelligence and blockchain to participate in collective decision-making and environmental governance.

Quinn DuPont is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business at University College Dublin. He is Founder and Editor in Chief Blockchain Research Network, Education Chair IEEE Blockchain Initiative, and Research Fellow at University College London’s Center for Blockchain Technologies. Previously, he held visiting research positions at Leu-phana University and the University of Victoria.

Andreas Dimmelmeier is a GEM STONES Marie Skłodowska-Curie doc-toral fellow at the University of Warwick and Copenhagen Business

School. His research is focussed on the expert networks in the emer-gence of sustainable_{ﬁnance and the role that economic ideas played} in this process.

Moritz Huetten is a researcher at Darmstadt Business School and a fel-low at the Center for Sustainable Economic and Corporate Policy (ZNWU). His research focuses on the normative and social implications of blockchain technology. He is involved in several research projects at Goethe University Frankfurt and Darmstadt Business School, as well as the research centre ‘Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe’ (SAFE).

Laura C. Mahrenbach is a research fellow and lecturer at the Bavarian School of Public Policy/Technical University of Munich. Her work focuses on emerging powers, global economic and digital governance, and the politics of big data.

Tony Porter is Professor of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. He is currently conducting research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, on ‘Num-bers in the changing fabric of transnational governance’.

Bernhard Reinsberg is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow and a Research Associate in Political Economy at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the design and effectiveness of international insti-tutions and organizations, with a speciﬁc emphasis on the practice of conditionality and earmarked funding, respectively.